Long Distance Clara drives a juggernaut

It has been a reasonably peaceful weekend so far. Fin, Rio and I went back to Ryerss and fed the horses apples, particularly our special friend Apollo whom you can see on the right. He is quite a heroic horse: he spent his whole life, before he came to Ryerss, being injected with snake venom so that his body could help make medicines for snake bites. Now he is enjoying his retirement, but he gets sick easily because his immune system was weakened by his job. He also eats like, well, a horse. There's a lot of inside of him to fill up.
One of the workers on the farm started talking to me about how he foundered and lost some weight before he recovered, and I said, "wait, sorry, back up, what does 'foundering' mean?" I don't know whether they thought everyone knew about horse problems, or whether I look like a horsey person or something. (He has special shoes to wear now. They take really good care of their horses there.)
Another time that day I was hungry and stopped at a branch of McDonald's to eat salad. While I was there, I played with their touch screen things where you can play various games. I like to play trivia games, so I was doing that, and I happened to be playing the game in French, and without a word of a lie one of the questions was (in French), "Which fast-food company made a pact with Satan in 1977?" I stared at the screen for a few seconds and then decided to see what would happen if I said, "McDonalds". It said, "Correct! To increase their profits." (This is, I think, some version of an urban legend about Ray Kroc appearing on TV and claiming this, which obviously never happened.) I suspect that the McD's executives were a little less careful about checking the French version than the English. I wonder whether I should mention this to anyone there.
I have some GNOME work to do, but I have less-than-brilliantly forgotten my ssh passphrase. I've sent a new public key to the sysadmins.
There is a guy called Brian, who (I think) is homeless, who hangs around town, and every time I walk past him he asks me questions about philology-- so I tell him things about language families and the various branches of Germanic, and we often end up discussing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Yesterday we were talking about sociolinguistics and the concept of prestige. I don't know whether he's actually particularly interested in linguistics or whether he's discovered that I like talking about it and he's glad of having someone to talk to. Possibly it's both.